The Rust Foundation with Lori Lorusso and David Wood

Lori Lorusso, Director of Outreach at the Rust Foundation, and David Wood, a Rust Project Director and engineer at ARM, join host Jay Faulkner to talk about what the Rust Foundation actually does behind the scenes — funding infrastructure, employing security engineers, and running a maintainer funding program for contributors who aren't backed by a sponsoring company.

The conversation covers Rust's path from a Mozilla research project to safety-critical infrastructure in operating systems, browsers, and even vehicles, plus a deep dive into why a single compiler feature (the standard library rebuild, or "build-std") took 11 years and a major communication breakdown within the project to finally ship. Lori and David also share two candid "gross moments": a non-technical presenter's conference talk gone sideways, and the long, frustrating road to getting a stalled feature back on track.

This episode is for developers, maintainers, and engineers who work with Rust (or are deciding whether to) and want to understand the people and politics behind the language, not just the syntax.

The Rust Foundation - https://rustfoundation.org/
Rust Project Goals - https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/build-std.html
ARM - https://www.arm.com/

G-Research is hiring in Dallas, TX and London, UK! Apply at https://gresearch.com/vacancies.

For a video version of this podcast, check out https://youtu.be/GCSn4kjSRRo.

The GR-OSS OUT Podcast is produced by Ben Wiley.